A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones Spoiler-Filled Discussion

I wonder how they'll pull that off? The show has shown us how huge the wall is, so how they heck are they supposed to be able to hit each other with arrows from that difference?

 

As I recall, only a few arrows actually made it to the top of the wall in the book. Their main (flawed) strategy was to break through the tunnel using the giants.

 

I tend to doubt they're actually going to show Stoneheart's birth. I thought they were, but I think the place to do that was the finale.

 

I thought so too, but I wonder if they will keep her low-key throughout the next few seasons. Had they introduced her now, I think casual viewers would expect her to be a major part of the plot going forward. But as we know, she starts off as a rumor, a shadow, quietly picking off the Freys.

 

In the books, the first time Jon sees Mance he approaches the gruff Tormund instead because Mance is a campy bard and not what he expected a warrior to be like. In the show they KEEP Jon mistaking Tormund for Mance but it's completely pointless as it's just Jon mistaking a gruff guy for... another gruff guy. I have no fucking clue what the point of that scene was in the show.

In the book, Mance expresses sadness for Halfhand's death. In the show he's delighted and offers to shake Jon's hand for it. The character is completely dumbed down.

In A Feast For Crows, Margaery isn't a schemer. Cersei's insanity, motivated by Maggy the Frog's prophecy, leads her to assume Margaery is an ultra-manipulative schemer when she's really not up to much. In the show.. Margaery is exactly what the ultra-insane Cersei thought she was in Book 4. They've completely missed the point, so it won't be nearly as interesting. Cersei will come across as sane and rational.

 

It's just Benioff and Weiss putting stuff from the books on screen without thinking about how it conflicts with their interpretation of the characters. Like when they use Stannis/Davos dialogue about duty and good not outweighing bad, even though TV Stannis doesn't care about those things. Or the Cersei/Robert scene from season one, which ("seven kingdoms couldn't fill the hole she left behind" notwithstanding) is well-done in its own right, but hard to reconcile with the characters' other actions.

Which is not to say that she's not clever-- she's certainly working to ingratiate herself with Tommen, and I think generally she knows more than she lets on. But the overtly manipulative TV version is definitely something else altogether, another example of the show's utter lack of interest in women who don't fit the feisty "Strong Female Character" mold.

 

Margaery in the books was a conspirator in Joffrey's murder, so I'd hardly call it a big change to portray her as a schemer. She's definitely more forthright, but I think that's partly another instance of a character being aged up.

 

Not true! They made Sansa token dumb blonde . She's been rid of all character development! Hopefully they do her Eyrie plot right.

So, I'm re-reading A Dance With Dragons for the first time since launch week. I've powered through A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords and A Feast For Crows over the past month and a half or so, I lent A Game of Thrones to a friend around 2 years ago and didn't get it back so will probably end up finishing my marathon with it.

A Feast For Crows benefits HUGELY from a re-read. I was frustrated at the time because of the lack of plot progression, especially in early Brienne chapters. Now that I knew what I was in for going in, I really, really loved almost the whole book.The moody, melancholic atmosphere was beautiful. Jaime's confrontation with the Blackfish was a classic ASOIAF moment, as was Doran's final line.

I'm finding A Dance With Dragons to be problematic. I'm REALLY enjoying the Theon, Bran and Davos chapters. Theon's chapters in particular are incredible, and up there with the best of GRRM's writing.

Tyrion's chapters are kinda a chore though. On first read through I didn't mind the Tyrion chapters as much because I assumed it was leading us to a meeting between him and Dany. Since I know this plot just kinda.. fizzles out it's frustrating a lot of the time and slows down the book. The chapters are well written (Though I'm so fucking tired of "Wherever whores go...") and I like the idea of having this long journey to calm Tyrion down after all the rage he'd built up but I don't think it quite worked. There's too many of these chapters and they kill the pacing of the book so far, though I'm only nearing the end of Part 1 (I'm a Brit!).

 

I really love the atmosphere of Feast too. It has obvious structural flaws thanks to the various reconfigurations of the overall story, but as you say there's something mournful and eerie about it, as a moment of potential rebuilding declines into further conflict and magic slowly creeps back into the world. Even Maggy's prophecy, which I know a lot of people don't care for, works for me in that respect.

The Tyrion chapters in Dance are a problem. There's something to be said for the psychological progression there, but I think Martin got too drawn into the Essos world-building involved, and let it expand an already languorous arc.

 

There are just way too many. Bran has like.. 3 chapters the whole book and Sansa got cut completely. Those are 2 of my fave 5 POV characters in the series, along with Jaime, Arya and Theon. Tyrion isn't a favourite of mine (Though I still like him a lot!), and spending so much time with him is irritating. I don't hate the Dany chapters nearly as much as fandom does, but I'd agree they were too numerous.

The 2 least interesting plots dominate the book. I find myself praying the next chapter is a Reek one whenever I'm on a Tyrion chapter now. The best antidote.

 

It's weird. For all the complaints about the pace of the last two books, some characters have fairly tight storylines. More happens, in terms of character development and plot progression, in five chapters of Arya and three chapters each of Bran and Sansa, than in twelve of Tyrion, thirteen of Jon, ten of Daenerys. Sometimes you can see the justification for the bloat. The Jon and Dany chapters (and Cersei in Feast), even though there still may be too many, are about emphasizing how complicated medieval leadership is, the many factors a monarch or a Lord Commander has to deal with. It needs to be big, so you can see why it might become too big. And the Brienne chapters, which I know a lot of people despise, are about continuing to show how war (and now peace) have affected the common people, and about Brienne's ongoing education in the cruelty of her world. (That will make no sense on TV, of course, since TV Brienne is already hard-edged, another stock Strong Female Character rather than Sansa with a sword.) But Tyrion... even allowing that he needs to be kicked around a bit more to build up the viciousness he's going to display when he gets back to Westeros, that doesn't take twelve chapters.

 

Brienne's first few chapters are way too slow but they pick up a lot in the second half of A Feast For Crows. The Quiet Isle chapter is absolutely beautiful. I thing Aeron Damphair got too much page-time, but I thought he was a good character and unjustly hated by fans. Victarion was awesome, and Euron was fucking awesome. Aemon's slow demise best evokes the feel of the book in my mind. It's very drawn out, slow and saddening. I like books like that.

A Dance With Dragons is good but it lacks the strong atmosphere of A Feast For Crows. I know Martin felt like he was giving the audience what they wanted with huge amounts of Tyrion and Dany in the next book to compensate but really, Alayne's chapters in the previous book kick them in to the dust.

 

"Egg, I dreamed I was old." Breaks my heart whenever I think of it.

In terms of atmosphere, I think the only real successes in Dance are the later Theon and Asha chapters, when winter has set in and both Stannis' camp and Winterfell are closed off, paranoid, and riven by internal conflicts. Gorgeous stuff, really, and one reason I'm looking forward to what winter will do to the tone of the southern plotline in the remaining books.

 

For all my bitching about ADWD, I rate the Theon plot in Book 5 as among the VERY best material in ASOIAF. Probably above anything in Book 1, actually.

I loved Theon in A Clash of Kings a lot because it was refreshing having a POV character that was such a dick (He's WAY softer in the show!), but I never felt much sympathy for him as he made a long series of mistakes, never learning and was doomed from the start. In A Dance With Dragons his plot completely broke my heart. "My name is Reek. It rhymes with freak." I also found Ramsay hilarious. I love it when he has a go at Theon for eating rats legally owned by Roose.

Really like the guy playing Ramsay in the show, even if he's nothing like the one I imagine or read.

 

One of the main things about how many people reacted to AFFC is that it came in the middle of a decade-long wait. If it had come out two years after ASOS, and with a timely followup a few years alter, I don't think some people would have been as disappointed (the same factors apply to many parts of ADWD). As well, AFFC dumped two whole new sets of POVs into the story when people really wanted more information on preexisting main characters who were omitted. I read them at the same time, so that really didn't apply to me. AFFC is the superior book, to me; there's far less fat.

Nonetheless, this is one area where the TV show could actually improve it, because there's more than enough material there for a really strong season (with a bit of spillover into the preceding and succeeding years).

 

Also, part of the reason the Tyrion chapters became harder to read in ADWD was because it was becoming more and more clear that Tyrion wasn't that likeable anymore. And in fact, he may have never been that likable on his own to begin with.

A large part of Tyrion's appeal (aside from the hilarious lines he got) was that all the characters around him were such 1-D asshats (Cersei, Joffrey, Pycelle, etc) that we enjoyed him being the one character who regularly humiliated and opposed them and could get away with it. His nasty behavior to them was welcomed and appreciated.

In ADWD he's no longer around them, and the folks he's nastier to are more likable and/or have done nothing to gain the audiences' contempt. So you begin to realize that this is probably how he'd come off in real life and it's not so likable anymore since he see him being equally a jerk to normal folks.

 

I don't mind if a character is nice or not, doesn't affect how fond I am of them at all. I love Ramsay, Joffrey and Roose despite them being monstrous human beings seemingly without empathy. The characters in Abrams' Star Trek are all heroes, yet I wish they'd all die in a horrific fire .

I don't mind a character being "unlikeable" at all. Not sure when it became a problem really. Macbeth and Othello are hardly likeable in the traditional sense.

Tyrion's ADWD chapters are weak because they're padded fat that dominates the book. Sometimes GRRM tunnels way too far in to a narrative dead-end. I love this series in large part because of the "filler" that isn't essential to the main plot, but I'd prefer more interesting filler. Tyrion's chapters weren't awful, they're well written enough. There's just too little story to justify that much time being devoted to a minor plotline.

The first 3 books have such strong structural elements. The last 2 feel weirdly random in pacing and structure, which is in stark contrast to something like Lord of the Rings which I think is perfectly structured. People on Westeros always bring up the behind the scenes story of the Meereenese knot, or the abandoned 5 year gap but.. they're terrible non-excuses. Just because a book has to be the transition book doesn't mean it has to be padded out with lesser material. The middle part of a trilogy is frequently the most praised. The second act shouldn't be when the pacing dies.

To use an example everybody knows, The Empire Strikes Back is the transition film with no real beginning or end. Yet, it doesn't just spend an hour meticulously showing Luke travel to Dagobah in order to fill runtime. The storytellers actually came up with interesting stuff to happen, despite the characters being put in place for the next movie.

 

I don't know. I think ASOS is the best book so far, but I really don't get a lot of the criticism aimed at AFFC and ADWD. If there hadn't been such a real world gap in their releases I, like previous posters, don't think there would have been as much complaining. They ARE paced different, but that's not bad. They have different goals in mind. I think they are all about worldbuilding, especially ADWD. We see MUCH more of that area of the world than we ever have before and much of it needs setup. I for one found it fascinating.

I also find it interesting when people complain about so much time being spent on "unimportant" or "minor" plotlines. We have not seen how this story ends. It hasn't been written yet. As such, we have NO idea whatsoever what may turn out to be important and what may not. I think such judgements have to wait until the saga is concluded. Hell, the whole concept of the ring seems kind of superfluous in The Hobbit, but we couldn't have The Lord of the Rings without it.

And I REALLY don't get the criticism that "nothing happens" in AFFC. There's a lot of stuff going on there.

 

On my two re-reads of the first four books, AFFC was always much harder to read. I thought it was slow and kinda uneventful when I read the first time, but it only got worse on the re-reads. If I'll ever re-read this book again, I'll probably skip Brienne and Dorne chapters altogether. I fucking hate Dorne and every single useless character in this part of the story. Brienne's chapters show that war is hell, but we already know this from Arya's chapters in ACOK and ASOS. It's telling the same damn thing for the third time. We also know that Brienne's quest is entirely pointless because Sansa is in Eyrie, so all of her chapters exist to basically just make her suffer and get disfigured and executed (sort of) in the end. All we learn from her chapters is that Sandor is probably alive.

I really liked ADWD chapters that were set in Westeros, except Dorne and Jon Conninghton. All the Essos chapters just kill whatever momentum the book develops. There's Quentyn, the single most pointless character in the books, even more than that idiot Kingsguard from AFFC. Aegon exists only because Martin has no idea how to bring Daenerys to Westeros, so Aegon does what Daenerys should've done a long time ago. I guess it's much easier to invent a new character (or "resurrect" in Aegon's and Connighton's case) than untie the Meereenese knot. And then there are Tyrion's chapters where he either admires the local flora and fauna or gets abused. And finally, Daenerys - 12 or so chapters of her being a stupid teen, destroying any development she had in previous books. Her last chapter is so disgusting I'd like to "unread" it, if it were possible.

 

You didn't even like the Doran twist at the end of AFFC?